This is an interesting article worth reading.....
Morality and Abstract Thinking
How Africans may differ from Westerners
by Gedaliah Braun
I am an American who taught philosophy in several African universities from 1976 to 1988, and have lived since that time in South Africa. When I first came to Africa, I knew virtually nothing about the continent or its people, but I began learning quickly. I noticed, for example, that Africans rarely kept promises and saw no need to apologize when they broke them. It was as if they were unaware they had done anything that called for an apology.
It took many years for me to understand why Africans behaved this way but I think I can now explain this and other behavior that characterizes Africa. I believe that morality requires abstract thinking?as does planning for the future?and that a relative deficiency in abstract thinking may explain many things that are typically African.
What follow are not scientific findings. There could be alternative explanations for what I have observed, but my conclusions are drawn from more than 30 years of living among Africans.
My first inklings about what may be a deficiency in abstract thinking came from what I began to learn about African languages. In a conversation with students in Nigeria I asked how you would say that a coconut is about halfway up the tree in their local language. ?You can?t say that,? they explained. ?All you can say is that it is ?up?.? ?How about right at the top?? ?Nope; just ?up?.? In other words, there appeared to be no way to express gradations.
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Apartheid: A Crime; or Race Realism?: Morality and Abstract Thinking: How Africans may differ from Westerners